Children learn almost everything by imitation. Babies mirror their parents’ facial expressions and eventually repeat the sounds that adults make, getting better and better at it until the sounds become words. Young children copy their parents’ speech patterns, even when their parents wish they wouldn’t. As they grow, they imitate the adults around them…

  “I, Edward the Eighth, of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare my irrevocable determination to renounce the throne, for myself and for my descendants, and my desire that effect should be given to this instrument of abdication immediately.” When King Edward wrote these…

  I’ve been on vacation for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve been thinking a bit about vacations. It seems to me that there are basically two kinds of vacations. One type is the exploratory vacation, when you go away from your home to see something you’ve never seen or experience a foreign culture…

  Well, it’s Trinity Sunday. Who would like to explain the doctrine of the Trinity? Me neither. And actually I’m pretty convinced that the people who put together the lectionary weren’t sure about it either, or they would have given us more helpful readings to work with. The fun thing about Trinity Sunday for preachers…

  Ezekiel found himself in a valley filled with death, without knowing exactly how he came to be there, or, in fact, exactly where he was. The floor of the valley as far as he could see was littered with dry bones. A tragedy, to be sure. A battle? A massacre? A natural disaster? Some…

  Later today, hopefully I will emerge from my weekly preacher nap and remember to call my mother. Some years I remember in advance to send her something, but this isn’t one of those years, and in my defense, my mom is an uncommonly difficult person to buy things for, because she doesn’t really seem…

You always hear that “the more things change, the more things stay the same,” and that is very true of this passage from Acts. So much about the culture of Philip and the unnamed Ethiopian eunuch is unfamiliar to us. So many things have changed over the last 2,000 years, and in many ways you…

  Who is my neighbor? Cynthia Moe-Lobeda tells a number of life stories in her book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation, and I have drawn from a few of them – and heavily from her book as a whole – for this sermon. One of the stories she tells is of Ravi Chandekar,…